Apple recently filed a patent for “Advertisement in Operating System.” The patent date was October 22 and the abstract of the patent is as follows:
“Among other disclosures, an operating system presents one or more advertisements to a user and disables one or more functions while the advertisement is being presented. At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s). The advertisement can be visual or audible. The presentation of the advertisement(s) can be made as part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at reduced cost.”

Apple has $34 billion in cash and the company has been doing very well financially. However their operating system market share is not very large when compared to Microsoft Windows. And Google is expected to launch an open source operating system in the near future. Apple is also competing with the Ubuntu operating system as it continues to spread on netbook devices. It may be in Apple’s interest to make their devices and operating systems more affordable given that the operating market is starting to get saturated and consumers are getting more options.

This patent indicates that Apple is interested in selling computers with a low cost operating system sometime in the future. The user may be forced to watch an advertisement before continuing an operation. Apple products have carried a premium price for a very long time. Perhaps it is time to for them to make more money from those who were not willing to buy Apple’s products based on today’s prices.

The inventors of the patent include CEO Steve Jobs, Freddy Anzures, Mike Matas, Gregory Christie, and Patrick Coffman.

Tomorrow T-Mobile is selling the BlackBerry Bold 9700 for $199.99. This is great news for T-Mo since it is their first 3G BlackBerry phone that they are selling. The specs of the phone include a 480×360 display and a 3.2 megapixel camera.

What do you get when you mash-up South Park and Lady Gaga? YouTube GOLD! On November 2, phr00ta uploaded a mash-up of the ‘Whale Whores’ South Park episode and remixed it with the Lady Gaga song Poker Face. The mash-up video has hit over 1 million YouTube views as of today. Why hasn’t Viacom removed it for copyright reasons? Perhaps phr00ta acknowledged that the copyright belongs to Lady Gaga and South Park Studios

Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) shares rose 8.30% in price due to a rumor that Nokia will be buying them out. This puts Palm’s market valuation at about $1.76 billion which was about the same price that Google bought YouTube. Another rumor floating around is that if Nokia does not buy Palm outright, they may license the webOS platform on their own mobile phones.

Joe Hewitt was the main developer of the Facebook iPhone application, but he recently decided to give up on that project. A couple of days ago, he wrote “Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project,” tweeted Hewitt. The main reason why he decided to give up on the App Store is because of Apple’s policies.

In an e-mail to TechCrunch, Hewitt said that he is philosophically opposed to the existence of the App Store review process and believes that they are setting a bad precedent for other software platforms. He said that he would rather be known for making the best platform available rather than being seen as a developer that has to go through a middleman in order to showcase software.

Joe Hewitt is best known for his contributions to the development of the Firefox web browser. In 2000-2003, Hewitt did a lot of the UI programming for the Netscape browser as well. Personally I applaud Hewitt’s contributions to the Facebook iPhone App and the Firefox browser. I hate to see him leaving the App Store developer community, but I’m not surprised he left because Apple’s review process has been highly criticized since the beginning.

Facebook Board Director and founder of social networking company Ning.com Marc Andreessen has decided to relocate his company to the old Facebook offices in Palo Alto, California. Above is a slideshow of Ning.com’s new offices. Ning is currently valuated at $750 million based on their previous round of funding at $15 million. Ning has about 37 million registered users and created about 1.7 million social networks.

Playdom is one of the biggest competitors of Playfish, a virtual application company that was acquired by EA for $400 million earlier this week. Given that Playdom is one of the very few remaining large virtual application companies, investors want to get in on their business model. Playdom raised $43 million based on a $260 million valuation.

In terms of revenue, TechCrunch speculates that they are making $60 million per year. The participants in the $43 million round of funding was Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Rick Thompson, and New Enterprise Associates.

While Zynga and Playfish focus on Facebook for selling virtual items within game applications, Playdom focuses more on MySpace. Mob Wars has about 14 million users on MySpace and the company as a whole has about 28 million monthly game players. About 60% of the traffic is from MySpace and 40% is from Facebook.

In terms of payments, Playdom makes 70% from direct payments, 10% from advertising, and 20% from third party offers. Playdom is based out of San Francisco and doubled their employee count over the last couple of months to 110 people.

Now that Playdom has a lot more money in the bank, they have decided to go on an acquisition binge. Playdom acquired Green Patch Inc., a Facebook application company and Trippert Labs, an iPhone application company. Green Patch made a garden simulation application on Facebook and has about 1.5 million monthly application users. Trippert Labs created several iPhone applications such as MobAir: Pilot Training and Blowfish.

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) has implemented the Google Android operating system in a new mobile phone that they are launching in China and Brazil. China Mobile and Claro will be selling the Dell Mini 3 very soon. The Dell Mini 3 is the company’s first smartphone and the specs are mum for now.